It's not just about China and America - smaller countries want to wage cyberwar too

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://qz.com/81997/its-not-just-about-china-and-america-smaller-countries-want-to-wage-cyberwar-too/

By Leo Mirani
Quartz.com
May 7, 2013

America’s Department of Defense yesterday released its annual report on 
China’s military capabilities (pdf). The report includes “electronic 
warfare” and “information dominance” as part of a larger campaign it 
says is an “essential element, if not a fundamental prerequisite” of 
China’s defense planning.

The report is good PR for China’s cyberwarriors but there is nothing 
surprising about the country’s ambitions. America itself is relatively 
open about its cyberwarfare activities. The US air force recently 
designated six bits of code as “weapons” so it could squeeze some more 
funding out of the defense budget. And the most widely known instance of 
cyberwarfare, Stuxnet, is a computer virus with not one, not two, but 
five “zero-day exploits,” as attacks on previously undiscovered 
vulnerabilities are knowns. Stuxnet was hailed as such a success that 
its authors, America and Israel, gleefully ensured that the whole world 
knew who was behind it.

Some researchers doubt the effectiveness of Stuxnet. That seems almost 
immaterial. Where the wide publicity given to Chinese attacks ensures a 
bogeyman, the success of Stuxnet—and the low cost of developing such 
weapons—has become a model for other countries to follow.

For example, here is what the British Intelligence and Security 
Committee’s latest annual report (pdf) had to say about cyberwar: “While 
attacks in cyberspace represent a significant threat to the UK, and 
defending against them must be a priority, we believe that there are 
also significant opportunities for our intelligence and security 
agencies.”

[...]

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